A Passover Pageant

Jeremy: There are sections of the haggadah that, quite frankly, could use a polish.
Dan: You're gonna do a rewrite on the haggadah?
Jeremy: It's not written in stone, Dan.
Dan: Actually, some of it is.
- Sports Night

I wrote a Passover pageant, for the story-telling portion of my all-Gentiles seder. It went over rather well. Enjoy, and feel free to use/re-post, with credit.

NARRATOR: Previously, in Genesis:

GOD: It sure is dark in here... claps twice Hey, that worked!

ABRAHAM: Man, I can't keep track of all these gods, can't I consolidate all my worship into one easy deity?

GOD: Sure!

ABRAHAM: Yay!

GOD: Although, not so much with the easy. Go kill your son Isaac.

ABRAHAM: What??

GOD: J/k, j/k! Chill out, theologians.

ISAAC: I'm a pretty passive figure, overall. Jacob, Esau, what are you boys doing?

JACOB: Just stealing Esau's birthright, Dad!

ESAU: Do you have any idea how badly I want to kill you?

RANDOM ANGEL: Me too! I am so not on Team Jacob. Let's wrestle. On a ladder. Just because.

JACOB: Whatever, I am Israel, I can do whatever I want. C'mon, wives, let's get cracking on this “descendants as plentiful as the stars” business, if you know what I mean.

JOSEPH: Hey guys! I had this dream that you were all bundles of grain and you were bowing down to me! Isn't that funny guys? Why are you throwing me in this hole? Did someone take my technicolor dreamcoat? Hey guys? Guys?

POTIPHAR'S WIFE: You there! Slave boy! How you doin'?

JOSEPH: Err...

JOSEPH'S PHAROAH: Man, these weird dreams suck. I wonder if there's anyone locked in my dungeon who can interpret them for me.

JOSEPH: Me! Me me me! So either there's going to be 7 years of plenty and 7 years of famine, or you want to bone your mother. 5 cents, please.

JOSEPH'S PHAROAH: Such low rates!

JOSEPH: For you, I make a deal. Now let's talk royalties.

NARRATOR: And so Joseph became the Pharoah's chief of staff, and invited Jacob, Joseph's asshole brothers, and 70 other free-loading relatives to shlep down to Egypt and settle in the land of Goshen. Several hundred years pass, and the Hebrews, as we are now calling them for some reason, have been fruitful and multiplied. Then there came a pharoah who knew not Joseph...

PHAROAH: I know not Joseph, but I do know that all these pesky Hebrews are really ruining the neighborhood.

ROYAL BUTLER: You can't kick them out, sir; they've got rent control.

PHAROAH: Bah! Might as well make them useful, then. What are they good at?

BUTLER: Nothing very useful, sir. Comedy writing, standardized tests, and kvetching.

PHAROAH: Well, let's give them something to kvetch about. This view of the Nile would look a lot nicer with some big pointy brick things, don't you think?

NARRATOR: So the Hebrews became slaves, which wasn't exactly a picnic, so they just kept on having children so that they'd have someone to complain to.

BUTLER: Sir, the Hebrews still won't go away. They're just packing more children into their huts.

PHAROAH: They'll never give up a nice deal like Goshen as long as they have kids who can inherit it. Tell the midwives Shifrah and Puah to kill every baby boy born to a Hebrew woman.

SHIFRAH: What??

PUAH: This job blows.

SHIFRAH: I so didn't sign up for this.

PUAH: Let's tell Pharoah that the Hebrew women are unnaturally vigorous and give birth before we can get there. The ruling class always likes to hear that the disenfranchised are hardy and animalistic.

SHIFRAH: Sweet.

NARRATOR: Thanks to Shifrah and Puah, a Hebrew woman named Yochevet gave birth to a baby boy and was able to hide him from the authorities. But after a few months he was too big to hide, so with great sadness, she put the baby in a basket and floated it down the Nile. The baby's sister Miriam hid among the bulrushes to see what would happen to her little brother.

PHAROAH'S DAUGHTER: Hey look, a basket! With a baby in it! Aww, can I keep it?

MIRIAM: But you'd have to nurse it and take care of it and stuff.

P's DAUGHTER: Oh. Well, am I a princess or am I a princess? I'll hire someone.

MIRIAM: I know just the woman for the job.

NARRATOR: So Yochevet was hired to nurse her own son, which is a pretty great scam, and though Moses grew up in the court of the pharoah, he never forgot his birth mother's teachings. One day, Moses was slumming it in Goshen, and he saw a slavedriver cruelly whipping a Hebrew.

MOSES: Dude, relax.

SLAVEDRIVER: Relax? I've got production deadlines to meet, and these lazy Hebrews aren't meeting their brick-baking quota, and you're telling me to relax?

MOSES: Maybe if you were a little nicer to them...

SLAVEDRIVER: “Nice” doesn't get you bargain rate pyramids, mister. Or did you never think about where all your fancy papyrus comes from?

NARRATOR: He hadn't, actually, and so Moses did what any privileged young man would do when confronted with the source of his privilege – blamed someone else and killed the slavedriver.

MOSES: Uh oh.

NARRATOR: So he skedaddled the hell out of Egypt and had a nice long wander in the desert, before coming across a lovely shiksa named Zipporah.

ZIPPORAH: Hey, stranger. New to this strange land?

MOSES: Sure am.

NARRATOR: And Moses spent a couple decades chilling with the Bedouins. Meanwhile, things kinda sucked for the Hebrews.

ALL: Grumble grumble grumble grumble

NARRATOR: But God heard their grumbling. One day, Moses was chilling with his sheep at the foot of Mount Sinai, when the mountain went all lightning-y. When Moses reached the summit, he found a bush that burned with flame, yet was not consumed.

MOSES: Awe-some.

GOD: Moses, Moses.

MOSES: Here I am!

GOD: Take off your shoes. I just vacuumed the holy ground.

MOSES: Who are you?

GOD: I want you to go into Egypt and tell Pharoah to let my people go.

MOSES: Okay great, but who are you?

GOD: I Am Who I Am.

MOSES: But who should I tell Pharoah has sent me?

GOD: I Am Who I Am.

MOSES: That's... not very grammatical.

GOD: No, it's tetragrammatical! Zing!

MOSES: Oh god.

GOD: Yes?

MOSES: Listen, can't you get someone else to do this? I'm busy. I have to... shampoo my sheep.

GOD: Moses.

MOSES: No seriously. I am slow of tongue. I mean, sloooww offff toooongggguuuueeee...

GOD: Get your brother Aaron to talk for you. He was always the cute one.

NARRATOR: Moses went back to Egypt and found Aaron, who was in fact the cute one, and they marched in to Pharoah's palace and said:

AARON: Let my people go!

PHAROAH: No.

AARON: Oh. Please?

P's DAUGHTER: Okay!

PHAROAH: No.

MOSES: Psst, Aaron! Try the staff thing.

NARRATOR: Aaron raised his staff over the Nile, and the water turned to blood. Or red like blood. Depending who you ask. Either way, for seven days and nights it was pretty nasty stuff. But the Pharoah's magicians were also able to turn water into red stuff, so Pharoah was unimpressed.

PHAROAH: Moses, Moses, Moses. What else have you got?

NARRATOR: Next, Aaron summoned up a plague of frogs. Hundreds, thousands of frogs, hopping all over Egypt on their little frog legs. But the magicians could pull frogs out of their hat too, and Pharoah's heart was hardened. Next came gnats, which are really gross.

PHAROAH: Ew ew ew! Make them go away! Make them go away and you can leave!

NARRATOR: But God hardened Pharoah's heart, which is one of those problematic translation things that I'm just gonna skip right over, and everyone went back to the drawing board. There were flies, and cattle disease, and boils. Then shit got real. It hailed great big hailstones that burst into flame. Locusts came and nommed all the crops. And Moses stretched out his hand and--

MOSES: claps twice

NARRATOR: --drew a darkness over Egypt for three days.

BUTLER: Okay, sir? I'm covered in boils, there's nothing to eat, and I keep walking into frog carcasses because I can't see where I'm going. Let those people go.

PHAROAH: Sorry, my heart's been hardened. Out of my hands.

AARON: Alright, but listen. This last plague's not going to be pretty.

NARRATOR: God spoke to Moses and Aaron, and gave them a shopping list which has changed little in five thousand years, with the same old bitter herbs and unleavened bread, along with a nice dab of lamb's blood for the doorway so that the angel of death would pass over their house. And at midnight, the angel of death swept through the land of Egypt, and slew the first-born of all the Egyptians.

PHAROAH: Get out! Out out out! Scram! Beat it!

AARON: Kthxbai!

BUTLER: You're not going to harden your heart again, right sir?

PHAROAH: Well... I do have all these annoying unfinished pyramids... And that Sphinx could sure use a nose.

BUTLER: Which you'll want the Israelites for, obviously! ...It's funny because they have big noses.

PHAROAH: To the chariots!

NARRATOR: Meanwhile, the Israelites had reached the Red Sea.

MOSES: Huh.

MIRIAM: This doesn't look good. Do we ford the river?

PHAROAH: I'm coming for you, Israel!

MOSES: I guess we're not waiting to see if conditions improve. Onwards!

NARRATOR: And Moses raised his staff and parted the sea, and the children of Israel walked across on dry land. But when Pharoah's chariots tried to follow, their wheels got stuck in the mud, and when the last Israelite reached the bank the waters came crashing back down, drowning the Egyptians.

MIRIAM: Hurrah! Now what?

MOSES: I have to climb this mountain, brb.

NARRATOR: The Israelites, however, were not very patient.

ISRAELITE 1: Where's Moses?

ISRAELITE 2: I'm bored!

ISRAELITE 3: Can we eat yet?

AARON: Hey guys! You know what would pass the time? Why don't you give me all your gold and jewelry, and I'll build a giant shiny cow!

ISRAELITES: Yaaaaay!

MIRIAM: Why do slaves have gold?

AARON: We looted the Egyptians on our way out.

MIRIAM: Seriously? That doesn't seem very under-doggy of us...

AARON: Listen, do you want to hear one of the lesser-known stories where our guys forcibly circumcise our enemies? Or do you want to make a shiny cow?

MIRIAM: Moo.

MOSES: I am back! I am back and I have brought you these two stone tablets, which contain the – oooh, shiny! [drops the tablets] Uh oh. Hope I saved the receipt...

GOD: [face-palm]

NARRATOR: But God gave the children of Israel another chance and gave the law to Moses again. But as punishment, the corrupted former slaves had to die off before they could enter the Promised Land. Forty years of wandering later, they finally reached their new homeland. Unfortunately some other people lived there already, but that's not a very pleasant story and these four glasses of wine aren't going to drink themselves, so let's just pretend the Israelites made friends with their new neighbors and nothing troublesome or morally squicky ever happened in the land of Israel ever again. The end!

A lesson in graceful writing, from the pens of Joseph Stein and Sheldon Harnick:

Tevye: Is he in bad trouble, that hero of yours?
[Hodel nods]
Tevye: Arrested?
[she nods again]
Tevye: Convicted?
Hodel: Yes. But he did nothing wrong. He cares nothing for himself. Everything he does is for other people.
Tevye: Yes, but if he did nothing wrong, he wouldn't be in trouble.
Hodel: Oh Papa, how can you say that? What wrongs did Joseph do? And Abraham, and Moses? And they had troubles.
Tevye: Yes, but... But why won't you tell me where he is now, this Joseph of yours?
Hodel: It is far, Papa. Terribly far. He is in a settlement in Siberia.
Tevye: Siberia! And he asks you to leave your father and mother, and join him in that frozen wasteland and marry him there?
Hodel: No, Papa. He did not ask me to go. I want to go. I don't want him to be alone. I want to help him in his work.
Tevye: Hodel...
Hodel: Papa.
[sings]
Hodel: How can I hope to make you understand, why I do what I do? Why I must travel to a distant land, far from the home I love. Once I was happily content to be, as I was, where I was. Close to the people who are close to me, here in the home I love. Who could see that a man would come, who would change the shape of my dreams? Helpless now, I stand with him, watching older dreams grow dim. Oh, what a melancholy choice this is, wanting home, wanting him... Closing my heart to every hope but his, leaving the home I love. There where my heart has settled long ago, I must go, I must go. Who could imagine I'd be wandering so far from the home I love. Yet... there with my love, I'm home.
[the train is heard]
Tevye: And who, my child, will there be to perform a marriage there in the wilderness?
Hodel: Papa, I promise you, we will be married under a canopy.
Tevye: Yes, yes. No doubt, a Rabbi or two were also arrested.
[the train pulls in, Tevye lifts Hodel's luggage aboard]
Hodel: [crying and hugging him] Papa! God alone knows when we shall see each other again.
Tevye: Then, we will leave it in His hands.
[he helps her aboard and watches the train pull out]
Tevye: [looking up] Take care of her. See that she dresses warm.

Today I learned that it's possible to write a cover letter that actually clarifies your interests and plan. I wrote the following in a cover letter yesterday (slightly adapted for posting). I read it over today and realized that it really DOES sum up my current life plan. Can't say that about many cover letters!

I want to educate people to be more awesome. When my classmates at Harvard ask why I'm in grad school for educational media, I blather something about the pedagogical potential of interactivity for reaching students of multiple intelligences. That's true too. But I also just want more cool people to hang out with – even if I have to make them cool myself.

Games are scaffolding. That's an ed school word, but it could very well be a gaming word too. Scaffolding allows students to grok sophisticated ideas by taking them there step by step, so that each stage is a well-supported progression from the previous. Games are scaffolded as well – when you level up, you have proven the ability to tackle harder bosses. When you unlock a new clue, you are biting off a manageable chunk of the meta-puzzle. The naturally scaffolded structure of games and puzzle hunts means that you can use them to make people do all sorts of fun things they wouldn't normally do.

Engaging video games are great and all, but it's far more awesome to appropriate video game mechanics to have fun in Real Life. A pervasive game can be used to encourage exploration in an old fort, critical thinking in a museum, willingness to wander off a trail in the woods, absurd behavior in a public place, and a whole range of other activities that I, in my infinite objectivity, find valuable.

I design games because games help people do cool things they wouldn't do otherwise.

A bit rough, yeah, but that's totally the idea! :)

Today I learned that pantsing, debagging, depantsing, drooping, shanking, skanking or dacking (in Australia), cacking, skegging, dekecking or just kecking (in the United Kingdom), scantying in Scotland and jocking in Ireland and, when in New Zealand, simply the down-trou all refer to the act of pranking someone by pulling down their pants.

Oh, Commonwealth countries. If the extra Eskimo words for snow reflects the abundance of the stuff in their lives*, what does this plethora of pantsing synonyms say about you?

I highly recommend the surprisingly informative wikipedia article List of School Pranks for further enlightenment/ideas.


*yes, yes, I know

On the college admissions process

Today I learned that high school students and their parents ask entirely the wrong questions about the college admissions process. Not stupid questions, mind. Just the wrong ones.

Their questions betray that they just don't get the point of the whole thing. A highly typical example: "My son has a 3.7 GPA and plays lacrosse. How many hours of community service does he need for Harvard?" This reflects a student-centered concept of the process that is inaccurate and counter-productive.

Admissions committees are not awarding prizes in a scavenger hunt. They're crafting a college class. Maybe it's different at less prestigious, more ranking-conscious schools, and they really do tick off a list of GPA/SAT/AP attributes. But the good places only care about those numbers inasmuch as they are shorthand for the attributes of Real Actual People. No one cares about your 1600 2400 if you aren't also special.

Maybe that's the first filter to the whole process - the first test of your Harvardiness is whether you can grok the reason for the admissions committee's existence. Which of course means this is yet another way in which disadvantaged kids are further disadvantaged... Understanding the motivations of the man behind the curtain, when everyone around you is an idiot, is a pretty sophisticated cognitive task.

There's just so much mis-information and bad advice - often coming from professional advice-givers, which is what sparked this blog post - that it makes me sad. And for many kids who don't have ivy-level parents or friends, the first way they learn about college admissions is through television. In my case, that meant seeing Zach Morris get a 1507 or some such impossible score on his SAT, and then watching the rest of the Saved By The Bell kids scheme to make the Hahvahd recruiter at the college fair notice Jessie Spano, as though those college fairs matter in the slightest.

Or just last week on LOST, that entire sideways-world subplot where Alex so desperately wanted a letter of recommendation for Yale from the asshole principal, and not from her mentor Dr. Linus, because the asshole principal was a Yale alum. NO ONE CARES IF HE WENT TO YALE. Ben Linus would have written a far better letter. Or at least manipulated Yale into doing his bidding, whatever. Ugh.

Maybe I should just write a tv show about kids applying to college, and do some good in the world.

Back from spring break! Back to learning!

Today I learned that in 1933, a Mr. Maxwell J. House* hired a rabbi to say that the coffee bean is more like a berry than a bean, and therefore coffee is kosher for Passover. And thus was born the Maxwell House haggadah, sheepishly tucked into grocery bags by the dozen every Passover by thousands of families who couldn't manage to remember where they stored last year's Maxwell House haggadahs.

Even though my 15 Maxwell House haggadahs - the fruits of my mother's visits to four different supermarkets last weekend - would be enough (dayenu!), I am having an all-Gentile, all-singer seder, and therefore am compiling my own supplement. Thus far it consists of "readings" from Marjorie Morningstar, The King & I, Tony Kushner, and The Nanny. Suggestions for quotes, songs, and other ephemera are quite welcome.

And, typed by hand from Death & Taxes: Hydriotaphia and Other Plays because amazingly this wasn't yet on the internet, I give you the following from Tony Kushner's rambling short "Notes on Akiba":

...And, and look how good my kid is, he... performs, he really performs, he memorizes, he is prepared, a performer, he's four years old he can barely read Green Eggs & Ham and look he has memorized lengthy strings of what are to him nonsense syllables which he will now produce flawlessly on command because he knows like the whole year to follow and his life along with it will be cursed, the crops will fail and Elijah won't come because YOU FORGOT WHAT COMES AFTER MA NISHTANAHA ETCETERA, and like, that's not affliction?

*not really, but the rest of it is true

Today I learned that the only way to survive hell-week - nay, hell-fortnight - is to give myself one lovely treat per day. And no, television and naps (unless in the hammock) and shameless facebook stalking don't count; must be somewhat more special.

After failing to follow this rule on Friday and Saturday, and crashing horribly, I started over with a wonderful-as-ever post-church brunch on Sunday. Yesterday featured a lovely stroll in the Arboretum, and today? Today I read a new Sherlock Holmes story.

I've actually read just a small percentage of the Holmes canon, despite being a fan. Once I realized how much I loved them, and how finite was the proper Conan Doyle canon, I decided to parcel out the original 24* over as much of my life as possible. So I only read new ones when I really, really need it. (I am allowed to reread A Scandal in Bohemia as much as I'd like). Delayed gratification - I has it.

That being said, "A Case of Identity" is a bit rubbish.



*Yes I know there's the post-Reichenbach stories, but I've not touched those yet

So today I learned that in 1969 they turned off Niagara Falls. I KNOW, right???

Jenny: I already ran out of work to do, like an hour ago.
me: You can read about how they turned off Niagara Falls

me: or King Ludwig II of Bavaria
Jenny: yeah, how did they do that?

Jenny: they turned him off, too??
me: well they had this giant red dial

me: and Superman didn't get there in time to stop them
Jenny: man! I hate it when that happens
me: and they dissolved Kryptonite in the water

me: so he couldn't go manually refill the waterfall with his Superlungs

me: or supermanually, as the case may be
Jenny: hahahahahahaha

Jenny: that's a great adverb

Jenny: how did we get the falls back?
me: well that's a helluva lot of water to divert, and all that water power actually creates enough electricity to provide 1% of the nation's daily electricity use (true story)

me: Which is of course why Lex Luthor was interested in the first place, not just because it would make a good headline in the Daily Planet

me: but when you take THAT much electricity, and put it with THAT much water

me: you're gonna eventually be like "oh come on, it can't really hurt that much"

me: and try to go for a swim.
me: That's how Lex lost his hair.

me: Fully electrifying the water (cuz when the person fell in it went zap) made the kryptonite particles disperse to a safe level

me: and Superman was able to dive in, rescue Lex, and then shift the dial back to its correct setting.

Jenny: ....wow, Liz. Wow.

Jenny: that is both a brilliant plot for a tv show and a staggeringly misleading portrayal of how electricity works

Today I learned about "Last Will," a collaboration between Punchdrunk and gaming collective Lost And Found. It's a MITE (Multiplatform Immersive Theatrical Experience), and it's a Punchdrunk production turned ARG, and it's basically what Sleep No More should have been.

But there's not much information about it online, aside from a small amount of press and this document. It sounds like the version that ran in 2008 was a prototype. Does anyone know more about it?

Today I learned about King Ludwig II of Bavaria. He built this:
Looks like Sleeping Beauty's castle, huh? That's because Disney based his castle on King Ludwig's, who based his castle on neo-Romantic German kitsch, which was based on cultural memory of medieval castles that never existed.

King Ludwig II liked to imagine that he was a fairy tale king, rather than the lame-duck monarch of a barely-sovereign state in the Industrial Revolution. Wikipedia says he was fond of wandering through the countryside, giving lavish gifts to commoners who were nice to him. His fairy tale castle broke the bank, but the Bavarians loved him anyway (who wouldn't love a deeply eccentric castle-commissioner?). His ministers loved him less, and they engineered a legal deposition by having him declared insane - not exactly a stretch, admittedly, for a man who wanted no more from his kingship than to canoe around his palace grotto while a soprano sang Die Walkure for him.

But still. The whitecoats came to get Ludwig and he balked - "How can you declare me insane?," he asked the doctor. "After all, you have never seen or examined me before."

The next day, Ludwig and the doctor were both found dead in a shallow lake.

How this is not yet a musical is beyond me.

Can't retweet the past?

Over the last two months, I serialized The Great Gatsby via Twitter on behalf of the American Repertory Theater. That's The Great Gatsby, the whole novel, in 140 character chunks. This was a promotion for the ART's production of Gatz - about which you can read my thoughts here - but it quickly became a labor of love.

Reducing classic literature into tweets sounds like just that - a reduction. But working with the text of Gatsby on such a minute and superficial level gave me a whole new appreciation for the jewel-like perfection of the language. Every sentence, every phrase tells an entire story. It is beyond masterful.

The followers of the @ARTGatz feed realized this as well, and I especially enjoyed seeing which lines they would re-tweet to their own followers. Some were predictable favorites - others were a bit more mysterious. I eventually collected every @ARTGatz re-tweet here, creating a sort of absurdist Gatsby micro-narrative. It's the world's first crowd-sourced abridgment. Enjoy.

THE GREAT GATSBY (abridged)

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Crowd-sourced via the followers of @ARTGatz

Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.

I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.

This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

"I'm p-paralyzed with happiness."

(I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

He stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling.

I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

It was nine o’clock—almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten.

—signed Jay Gatsby, in a majestic hand.

She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she’d take care of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses.

“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, & then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.

It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself...

Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene.

“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”

...a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip.

Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I've ever known.

Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.

“I see you’re looking at my cuff buttons.” I hadn’t been looking at them, but I did now.

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute. “He just saw the opportunity.”

The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime...

...and peering toward the bleared windows from time to time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were taking place outside.

Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little now and then with gusts of emotion.

“Oh, hello, old sport,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. I thought for a moment he was going to shake hands.

—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue.

Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds.

“It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before."

“You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”

—not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.

No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

James Gatz—that was really, or at least legally, his name.

The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.

...and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor.

they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

—mostly I was in New York, trotting around with Jordan and trying to ingratiate myself with her senile aunt—

“I know your wife,” continued Gatsby, almost aggressively.

By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.”

It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

“Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie together.” A breeze stirred the gray haze of Daisy’s fur collar.

Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper...

...bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again.

...and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.

“She didn’t like it,” he insisted. “She didn’t have a good time.” He was silent, and I guessed at his unutterable depression.

“The dance?” He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. “Old sport, the dance is unimportant.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

He talked a lot about the past, and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself, that had gone into loving Daisy.

—an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago.

“Hot!” said the conductor to familiar faces. “Some weather! hot! hot! hot! Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?”

That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!

“It seems pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun—or wait a minute—it’s just the opposite—the sun’s getting colder every year."

“What will we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of——” I hesitated.

A pause followed this apparently pointless remark.

“Do you mean you’ve been to a medium?” inquired Jordan humorously. “What?” Confused, he stared at us as we laughed. “A medium?”

“An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”

We were all irritable now with the fading ale, and aware of it we drove for a while in silence.

Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s faded eyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby’s caution about gasoline.

“We’ve got enough to get to town,” said Tom. But there’s a garage here,” objected Jordan. “I don’t want to get stalled in this baking heat.”

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic.

“We’re getting old,” said Daisy. “If we were young we’d rise and dance.” “Remember Biloxi,” Jordan warned her. “Where did you know him, Tom?”

Jordan smiled. “He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was president of your class at Yale.”

“Open the whiskey, Tom,” she ordered, “and I’ll make you a mint julep. Then you won’t seem so stupid to yourself. . . .

Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

"But both of us loved each other all that time, old sport, and you didn’t know. I used to laugh sometimes."

...and in my heart I love her all the time.”

She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once—but I loved you too.”

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

It came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment, and then disappeared around the next bend.

“There’s some bad trouble here,” said Tom excitedly.

“What are you doing?” I inquired. “Just standing here, old sport.” Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation.

I must have felt pretty weird by that time, because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his pink suit under the moon.

There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture, and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing.

He knew that Daisy was extraordinary, but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be.

Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine;

It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes.

and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes...

She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. . . .

The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves.

Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath.

..even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.

He left feeling that if he had searched harder, he might have found her—that he was leaving her behind.

He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him.

But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

But when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry “Oh, my God!” again...

“Don’t do it to-day,” Gatsby answered. He turned to me apologetically. “You know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer?”

and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me, but you can’t fool God!’”

Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool.

From the moment I phoned news of the catastrophe to West Egg village, every surmise about him, every practical question, was referred to me.

In fact, there’s a sort of picnic or something. Of course I’ll do my very best to get away.” I ejaculated an unrestrained “Huh!”

...and I should have known better than to call him.

I mentioned Gatsby.

“Oh—h!” She looked at me over again. “Will you just—What was your name?” She vanished.

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he suggested.

Of course we was broke up when he run off from home, but I see now there was a reason for it. He knew he had a big future in front of him.

“I come across this book by accident,” said the old man. “It just shows you, don’t it?” “It just shows you.”

So when blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air + wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all—Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners...

I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky.

Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels.

“You threw me over on the phone. I don't give a damn about you now, but it was a new experience for me, & I felt a little dizzy for a while.”

She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties...

—look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting on the sideboard, I sat down & cried like a baby.

Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.

As I sat brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.

It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

THE END

Today I learned that Figment is coming to Boston! Figment is a wonderful zany arts festival on Governor's Island in NYC and they're doing an installment along the Charles this summer! Yay!